> I think most of the complexity stem not just from the word count, but rather that everything interacts with everything else.
And most specifically in layout and rendering. HTML, JavaScript and the parts of CSS that aren’t, y’know, doing anything, are all very straightforward, despite having the significant majority of the word count. If anything, I’d say that in web matters implementation difficulty is inversely proportional to word count, because its verbosity pretty consistently comes from precision (which makes implementation easy). Layout stuff would be much harder to define exhaustively in that fashion, nor is it done so in most places.
And most specifically in layout and rendering. HTML, JavaScript and the parts of CSS that aren’t, y’know, doing anything, are all very straightforward, despite having the significant majority of the word count. If anything, I’d say that in web matters implementation difficulty is inversely proportional to word count, because its verbosity pretty consistently comes from precision (which makes implementation easy). Layout stuff would be much harder to define exhaustively in that fashion, nor is it done so in most places.